(b Hamburg, Feb 16, 1803; d Lübeck, Nov 19, 1875).
German painter, draughtsman, stained-glass designer, illustrator and restorer. In Hamburg he studied drawing with Gerdt Hardorff the elder (1769–1864) and painting with Christopher Suhr (1771–1842) and Siegfried Bendixen (1786–1864). His admiration for early German art was inspired during a sketching trip through Schleswig-Holstein in June 1823 with Erwin Speckter. Drawings from this period include a copy of Hans Memling’s altarpiece in Lübeck Cathedral. Following a sojourn in Dresden in 1824, Milde and Speckter travelled to Munich in the summer of 1825 where they studied history painting at the Akademie. In 1826 they lived briefly in Rome; and Milde again worked in Rome from 1830 to 1832 where he was in contact with the Lukasbrüder. Their preference for an outline style reinforced Milde’s own primitivizing linear manner derived from his study of Northern Renaissance art. Milde’s few extant paintings are mostly portraits from the 1830s, although history paintings, genre scenes, marine views and landscapes have also been attributed to him. Milde completed both bust-length oil portraits and family groups set in domestic interiors, which provide a detailed record of middle-class life in Hamburg at this time. In watercolours such as ...
